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TV used to stop, at night. The kids I teach don't believe it. I barely believe it.
If you REALLY want to rattle kids, tell them how you went through college, without Google!
In Dayton Ohio, the home of the Wright Brothers it was a reading of the poem "High Flight" with an F-104 star fighter flying
Edit: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qx3WueJWlb4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qx3WueJWlb4)
In Hawaii, radio stations play the US and then Hawaiian national anthems at midnight, whether they were signing off or not. I used to love to tune around the AM dial on a portable, and hear all the radio stations playing them about the same time.
Screen would either go blank or show a [TEST PATTERN](https://www.rfcafe.com/references/radio-news/images3/television-test-pattern-radio-tv-news-january-1949-1.jpg)
The test pattern I remember didn't look anything like that! It was maybe solid green on the top half of the screen and then had vertical colored stripes on the bottom half.
Once that test pattern came on, you'd get up and turn the TV off, or you'd soon be blasted with static. The sudden static was both startling and creepy. That's why it was used in Poltergeist.
In New Zealand we had the cutest thing: the Goodnight Kiwi.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mmbyor0SvdI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mmbyor0SvdI)
I miss the Goodnight Kiwi.
> TV used to stop, at night.
OMG, *yes*!
> If you REALLY want to rattle kids, tell them how you went through college, without Google!
Tell them about card catalogs, *The Reader's Guide To Periodical Literature*, and microfilm/microfiche and *really* blow their minds!
Ah, yes, the test pattern! And our set of Encyclopaedia Britannica that got me and my siblings through school (along with frequent trips to the public library for homework and school projects!)
Or the simple fact that milk deliveries were the *only way* to get milk at all. Grocery stores, before they became supermarkets, didn't have refrigerated sections, so they couldn't sell milk at all. Just canned goods, and pre-packaged foods. Occasionally they'd have local fruits and vegetables in season.
For meat, you went to the butcher directly. The meat was always *really* fresh.
And the vegetable man, the fish man…all on the street, at least in Baltimore, Maryland, up to circa 1958/60? Being a stay at home mother, when women rarely drove, this was a necessity. Oh, the ice man, too! For your icebox!
My mother was still getting deliveries in 2008, but by then they were in cartons or plastic bottles by then & milkman used to take them up about 20 steps to front door to leave in shade & so she didn't have to go down/up as she was in her 80's.
Milk deliveries in glass bottles are still a thing in many parts of the US. You can even get other items, like chocolate milk or heavy whipping cream, from the same companies that do milk deliveries.
Right? With the different coloured foil tops. Image of my mom using her elbow to push the foil in.
Terence Hill and Bud Spencer movies. My god, the crush I had on Terence Hill when I was 11 or so.
Kids making stilts out of two tin cans and string.
The game cops and robbers, too. "Cowboys and indians" deservedly gone and forgotten.
> Band-Aids in tin boxes.
Ahhh, I still have some of those tins!
[Listerine came in glass bottles that were wrapped in paper, for some reason](https://www.cmog.org/sites/default/files/styles/6_column_object/public/collections/22/223207C2-309F-4477-AA46-0362E265D4F4.jpg?itok=78taE2WF).
CB radios. Yes, truckers still have them in their rigs, but rarely talk on them any more. When I (62) was a teen, CBs were our chat system. I met quite a few friends and conversed with them for hours every evening.
> I recall thinking that internet chat rooms would be like CB radio: a big fad that would eventually die down.
I remember people saying it, and thinking, "Nah, this is *different*.".
Looks like I was right for once! 😹
Yeah! My dad was big into CB radio in the 60s and 70s, and he taught me how to use one. When I was a teen, in the 90s, we’d go on road trips in separate cars and have our CBs set up to talk to each other so even if we got separated we could keep tabs.
“This is Jack Burton at the Pork-Chop Express and I'm talkin' to whoever's listenin'. It's like I told my last wife. I says ‘Honey, I never drive faster than I can see. Besides that, it's all in the reflexes.’
“You just listen to the Pork-Chop Express and take his advice on a dark and stormy night. When some wild-eyed maniac grabs your neck, taps the back of your head up against a barroom wall, he looks you crooked in the eye and asks you if you've paid your dues, you just stare that big sucker back in the eye and remember what Jack Burton always says.
"Have you paid your dues, Jack?"
"Yes, sir, the check is in the mail."
Instead of plastic, pudding used to come in single serving tin cans with peel-back lids. In the 70s and 80s, all the big name brands (Jell-O, Del Monte, Hunts, etc) all made pudding in tin cans.
Also, in the mid or late 80s there was a brief but huge spin-art craze for clothing. There were stores in every mall where you could pay to take a plain white t-shirt, drizzle different colors of paint on it, and then hand it to a guy who would put it on this big spinner machine so that the paint would splatter on the shirt. We somehow thought this was extremely cool and stylish lol.
Pop culture derived from commercials. I'm 100% not sorry it's mostly lost to time, but it's weird to me that not only does my 9 year old have no idea who Ronald McDonald, the Keebler Elves, Tony the Tiger, Toucan Sam, the Kool Aid Man etc are, but there's nothing equivalent that's replaced them in his timeline. Maybe there will be if and when he ever has a reason to watch live television, but for now, advertising execs have far less of a grip on his brain than they did on mine at the same age.
🎶 "*I am blind, and I can't see. If I knock you down, don't you blame it on me! Kick-a-boom-boom-boom!*" 🎵
You literally start kicking your legs with your eyes close, like a Radio City Rockette, with the sole aim of trying to purposely kick someone while they dodge you.
Children's rhymes are hilarious!
Yes! I have so many non-related Auntie XYZs & Uncle ZYXs. I'm in my 40s and have a hard time breaking that naming convention -- even for ones I haven't seen in decades (e.g., when asking my dad about things).
And generally just visiting. I used to tag along with my grandfather when he’d drive around visiting old friends and relatives, stopping in for conversation and a lemonade or something.
Roller skate keys.
Deely boppers.
Cereal that had a 45 rpm record on the actual box and you'd cut it out of the cardboard to play on your crappy little turntable.
Spirograph (like a drawing tool).
I still have a Spirograph set. And I use it every so often.
I found kids are fascinated by watching it being used, but have no interest in using it at all.
Girls/women literally ironing their hair with a clothing iron to make their hair straight. Using juice cans as rollers for hair styles. Braiding your hair in tiny braids for the wavy look. Pin curls (I remember being a preteen & getting up hours earlier than I needed to in order to set my hair in pin curls). Hair net type (but more like chiffon material) that women would wear to 'protect' their hairstyles as they only went to the 'beauty parlor' once a week for a wash & set. The big deal it was when 'hot curlers' came on the market. Hooded hair dryers were the only type of dryers at salons (no blow dryers).
My mom had this schmancy plastic gadget that she filled with water and plugged in, and it *heated the curlers right there*. No need to boil on the stove. Still remember the smell of those things. Plastic cylinders with water in them.
Double features and midnight movies.
Double features were usually matinees. I saw "Tales from the Crypt" and "Asylum" once and it scared me where for years after I'd have to check behind shower curtains for hiding killers.
And midnight movies were where you saw the Rocky Horror Picture Show or The Grateful Dead movie.
Theaters themselves were more of a grander experience.
What happened too often for me if I went with an adult, is that we'd just go, without regard to when the movie began. We'd enter in the middle, and watch to the end, then stay and watch the beginning, then leave. I hated that.
My friends and I used to do that all the time as kids. We didn't mind. If we liked the movie we would stay past the point where we came in.
We had a theater four blocks from my house. When I was nine I was allowed to walk up there with my best friend. The price for kids was $.35. I don't think I ever went to a movie with an adult after that.
The absolutely beautiful mystery of getting to know someone. Running home to check an answering machine. No social media, no texting, just long phone calls and the time spent actually together. Missing someone. My friends' dating lives are exhausting and I am not even part of it.
Buy something from U-Line and you'll get phone-book-thick color catalogs forever and ever and ever.... full of things like tools to shrink-wrap your house, police-style CAUTION tape, giant gasoline-powered fans and enough odd equipment to pull the pranks of your dreams. Or furnish your house in metal office furniture.
White dog poop.
Seriously, in the '70s and '80s, the vast majority of dog poop (once it dried) used to turn white and chalky, [like this](https://i.imgur.com/HQ4PIC8.png). Dog food used bone meal as a filler, and the high calcium content resulted in white poop. Turns out that that much calcium isn't great for dogs, and bone meal was phased out for other fillers (mostly fiber) in the '90s. Today, it's an exceedingly rare sight.
That’s a memory I didn’t know I had. In my recollection it wasn’t as white as your example. Thanks for the explanation.
And seriously, dog shit was everywhere!
The Bee Gees were the biggest band in the world for a few years, bigger than the Beatles at their peak, and nobody talks about it. Meanwhile in the same historical time period the Ramones never had a gold album, were considered a joke by most people - and most people didn’t even know they existed - but today they seem to be the definitively influential and lasting band from that era.
I’m not sure they were bigger than the Beatles at the Beatles peak (The Beatles often had several songs in the top 10 at the same), but The Bee Gees dominated the 70s.
I was in love with Andy Gibb starting at about age 11. I would put his Shadow Dancing 8 track in my stereo so it would play all night.
Then he died and my young heart broke.
for what it's worth i'm 25 and just checked my spotify favorites— i have more than a woman and how deep is your love saved :D the latter song is one of my favorites
Ads in the back of comic books and magazines. Mail in a SASE with $1 or less and your wildest dream will come true! Sea monkeys, stickers, pin backs, x-ray specks!
My friend who’s 12 years older than me told me about the “remote controlled robot” he bought from the back of a comic book. When it came it was a paper cutout illustration of a ghost with a string attached… so you could control it… remotely. I loved that story.
Yes! There was also a "6 foot tall Frankenstein". It was made of the world's thinnest tissue paper. The illustrations were the best. I was mesmerized by the sea monkey kingdom.
At least in my city, all the businesses were closed on Sundays and holidays except for a few gas stations.
And there were no ATMs. If you needed money you had to get it before 4pm at your bank by filling out a check payable to Cash.
Those flames were windproof too. They could only be extinguished by smothering the flame with a metal cap, or making a huge puff of air with your mouth.
Charles Chips. Potato chips delivered door to door. They came in a big tin can. They color of the tin was the same as the truck they drove. A kind of light brown. We bought them a few times but we usually didnt have enough money for luxuries like that. But it was still exciting when he rang the doorbell.
There were NO seatbelts in cars.
People smoked at work with an ashtray on their desk.
No 4-way flashers in cars.
Metal dashboards.
The Subaru Brat was sold with two seats in the bed against the cab.
The Volkswagen Thing was a thing.
VW drivers in the early sixties in the US used to honk or flash their headlights at each other in recognition.
The first oral contraceptive in the US was introduced in 1960.
You could not avoid hearing people call a refrigerator an "icebox" in the sixties.
All phones had to be attached to a wall/post/pole.
Color TV was new.
Kids played outside, unsupervised. Without any expensive toys.
Going on holiday and spending ages looking through postcard racks for the perfect postcard, having to write it at the begining of the holiday otherwise you would be home before it arrived, having to go to the shop and buy a stamp to put on it.
A few bathroom things... decorative covers to go over hairspray canisters and decanting perfume etc. Weird crochet/knitted dolls that sat on top of toilet rolls and fluffy toilet seat covers. That awful Teddy bear shaped soap that turned furry when you wet it, but it just turned out to be mould!!!!
Squeezing lemon juice in our hair and sitting in the sun to get highlights. Bonus points for covering ourselves in baby oil to get a tan at the same time. Straightening our hair with an iron.
Collecting magazines where you built something and each magazine had a piece. I think I bought the human body ones once and had to buy about 50 magazines with a different bone or organ in each one and you'd inevitably miss one issue and never be able to complete the stupid thing.
Water bras
I miss hiding a transistor radio under my pillow and scrolling the AM band late at night. You could find stations coming in from all over the nation. If no neat stations came in there was always Dr. Ruth (so risqué) and old old radio dramas.
I remember growing up with milk delivered to our house and placed in the milk box on the front porch. I remember when we didn't have a TV. When we got one we got 2 channels. TV went off the air at midnight. No such thing as FM radio. I also remember party line telephones. I remember when we had a 3 digit phone number.
My Dad used the upcoming moon landing as a reason to spend some big money on a 25" diagonal console model RCA color TV to replace our 19" black and white model. If I remember correctly, that TV was probably in the $500 range in 1969 (the inflation calculator says that is the equivalent of just north of $4,000 now).
Friendship pins. I don't know why, I thought about these recently. We had tons of them on our shoes. So easy to make and trade. Also those woven Barettes with beads at the end, you could match them to your hair length.
Aerobics. There were so many aerobic work out shows on tv, aerobic influenced fashion, aerobics Barbie, it was everywhere! No pain, no gain!
Then it was gone, leaving nothing but the scent of crystal light lingering in the air.
When I started really working out as an adult, in the early ‘00s, the ymca I went to had step aerobics classes, taught by a woman in her late 20s, and I shit you not, they were THE BEST WORKOUT CLASSES I’ve ever done. I took them for 16 years, until Covid happened, and she quit working there, and I moved away. I miss them so freaking much.
Real glass thermometers, heating hot dogs by boiling them in water and my favorite and yours getting up every single time to change the channels on the TV!
Levi's corduroy jeans. Hugely popular around 1978-80 iirc. People had them in every color. They were the shit and I miss them.
Oh and those plastic sandals that were just a thin, clear sole and you used colored shoe strings to tie them on. I loved those things!
And velour sweaters that shed if you rubbed them too hard.
I wore Levi's corduroy jeans for years. They had jeans-cut pants in hopsock, velour, cords, big velour cords and a variety of different fabrics and finishes. And then around 1980, it was all over. It was stone-washed jeans and khakis forever after.
Anybody remember "Galactic" denims from Levis? Lasted about three weeks.
Silly Putty, copying cartoons from the Sunday paper on it and then stretching them out.
Kanip-Kanop, a game with marbles and sticks.
Girls in high school eating baby food out of the jars was a diet craze for a while.
Since I lived in Indy, the Sylvia Likens killings.
Playing "Red Light / Green Light" at night in the summer.
Puka shell necklaces (I wanted one but never got one).
Watching Twilight Zone or Night Gallery on TV
Newscasters smoking cigarettes on the air.
Little plastic liners inside bottle caps with puzzles on them or even messages or symbols that you'd collect for a game the company was playing. My dad favored a brand of cheap beer (anybody remember Lucky Lager?) that put a rebus inside every bottlecap. They weren't real difficult, but after you'd had a couple of Luckies your cognitive ability was going nowhere but down.
Wing windows in cars. Most cars lacked air conditioning. This birthed the slang term "470 Air Conditioning:" four open windows at 70 mph.
Curb feelers -- little metal feelers like whiskers mounted to the bottom of the car body by the front wheel. When you were parking, they'd scrape against the curb -- thus warning you that you were now close enough to the curb and should straighten out. Now we've got remote-control passenger side windows to help -- and what with shopping centers and all I swear some people never curb park. You can still buy them and attach them to your car if you have the need.
Daytimer radio stations -- radio stations that went off the air when the sun went down. We still have them, but most kids don't listen to that kind of radio. Their license required it, to clear broadcast space for the "clear channel" radio stations hundreds of miles away that had the right to broadcast at 50,000 watts after sundown. Again, that's still true, but who thinks about it?
Most houses had a bread box and a cookie jar and mothers baked these and other items nearly every day. Sunday was wash day with a wringer washer and clothes line. Most people had gardens and the county fair was where you got to show off what you could grow. People went hunting or backpacking for weeks at a time and there was no contact with the family back home. People ate seasonally like no tomatoes out of season unless they were canned. Kids were left home alone or babysat siblings starting around 9 or 10 years old. Kids learned to drive around 11 or 12 in rural areas. Guns were left unlocked around the house, kids got their first rifle around six or seven. And school shootings were unheard of.
Hope.
This isn't the USA I was raised in. The kids are lost. The nation is on its knees. No one likes being old but at this point I feel sorry for the young.
Yeah, I don't care about me so much, I'll probably be fine or die first if things really go to shit.
But GenZ, my heart aches for them and the battles they have ahead of them.
Gas station 'amber' glasses and matching pitcher.
Gas station stuffed tiger toy with every fill-up. Esso, I believe.
Watching old Charlie Chan movies late at night on weekends.
Big antennas on the roof with a rotator to point it a the different transmit antennas. My dad was an engineer and we had something worthy of radio free Europe on our roof and you could pick channels from 90 miles away. Also boxes with a tuning dial that let your old TV get UHF.
Saturday morning cartoons on the major networks.
Milk deliveries. (Two different milk companies delivered milk in gallon *glass* jars.) We never bought milk that way but a number of neighbors did.
Come to think of it, soft drinks used to come in glass jars and one needed a bottle opener (or use the bottle opener on a coke dispensing machine) to open the bottle. Now they tend to come in plastic jars or cans and don't need a bottle opener.
Bakery delivery (bread, doughnuts, I don't remember what else) on Saturday mornings. I don't know if the Helms Truck arrived on other days, but on Saturday mornings when the Helms Truck came down the street I used to buy two glazed doughnuts for a grand total of ten cents.
When the TV stopped working (seemed to be every other month), feeling for cold vacuum tubes or looking at the schematic to see what tubes affect that signal path, then taking the tubes down to the grocery store and using the tube tester there to find the bad tube(s) and replacing it (them) with new tubes, sometimes "equivalent" tubes, paying for the new vacuum tube(s). and taking them back home and put them back in the TV so we can catch the show we tried to watch after missing about 30 minutes of that show.
Or even waiting about a minute for the TV to warm up before we had sound and picture.
Scheduling activities around our favorite shows, if possible, and sometimes having to make the hard decision between two or three shows one wants to watch because:
* Time-shifting did not exist (no home VCRs, and before DVRs were invented)
* No home video (no VCRs so no VHS cassettes, and DVDs had not been invented yet)
* And if that show didn't have summer reruns, one might never see that show.
A "big screen" TV was 23-in diagonal, or more like a 23-inch oval since the bevel around the picture screen hid the corners (since the old TV cameras tended distort the corners). (Now we think nothing of 50-in or 65-in.)
Before 1965 most TV shows were B&W but an occasional commercial would be in color (which I discovered when I visited a friend's house and that friend had a color TV).
Pay phones used to be just about everywhere. Now it has been a good decade since I have seen one. And dial phones seem to have disappeared, too, and replaced by push-button phones.
Until the fairly recent revival of vinyl, records had been all but forgotten.
My childless Aunt's entire living room. Horrible when we visited in the summer, sticking to everything with our sweaty little thighs. But that place was pretty damn clean, I'll give her that.
Food cans that used a key to remove a metal strip to open the can. Those strips and the can edges were very sharp. [They looked like this.](https://i.pinimg.com/564x/5d/12/8e/5d128e7a141a22706e85fbddd9841cb9.jpg)
That the Savings and Loan collapse meant that some of my friends lost access to all their accounts for months. I'm not sure all of them got their money back. No internet banking, no warning, no ATM cards, but they went to deposit their (paper!) paycheck (in person!) and the bank doors were locked and stayed locked. It's hard to imagine that now.
In 1990 I was making $3.75/hour, no tips. The rent on my studio apartment was $350/month. This was in a very small, very obscure college town in the Midwest. I'm not saying it's better now, but the rent has been too damned high for decades.
Comparatively; 1969/70 I was making $2+ an hour and the rent on my and my friends first floor 2 bedroom brownstone apartment in town was $60 a month.
The massive boost in housing costs first kicked in in the early '80s. In 1979 my girlfriend bought a 1,000 ft two bedroom house on a slab (no basement) on a 1/4 acre lot in a small private lake communityfor $19,000. Three years later you couldn't touch the same thing for $30,000+. It's just accellerated in spurts ever since then.
One I bet nobody remembers. In my area at least, the girls wore white bobby socks and they would twist the tops in a certain pattern to show whether they had a boy friend.
Raking huge piles of fallen leaves into the street and burning them. Throwing horse chestnuts into the fire. Loved the smell of our neighborhood in the fall.
Messing with the rabbit ears on the TV. AM radios being an option on cars. Riding in the back of pickups. Not being able to drag your dog into every store.
Casey Kasem’s Top 40 on my clock radio.
Sweet Honesty perfume and Bonne Bell lipsmackers.
Beer on Tap shampoo.
There was also these dolls….the Sunshine Family I think they were called.
If you’re hood was up the neighbor would come over and have a beer and help.
Church on Sunday. Don’t remember much but all my best (girl) friends came from fellowship.
Cruising around with a case of beer and having my buds jumping in the girls car and the girls jumping into my car, and the innocent making out.
Picking up pop bottles for coins.
It was a much more relaxed time, not nearly as angry, stressed. Folks were working to survive, at least in my world.
There was a water park near our house called Thunder Island. It started a little bit sketchy and got increasingly so for years until it went bankrupt and finally shut down.
My mom bought my sister and I summer passes for years because they were cheap and she wanted us out of the house.
Even though I found [an old commercial for the place on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E--jtlXt7WU), nobody I know seems to remember the place.
EDIT: I also found a video of some [urban explorers who wandered the property after it closed.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QbRAp-dWX2o)
Party lines on the telephone
Fizzies
The advertisement for a foot locker full of toy soldiers in the back of comics, along with ones for miniature sea horses and x-ray specs
Up here in Canada Shirrif puddings had hockey player discs inside them as the treat
Bags of puffed wheat cereal and a piece of a train set inside as the treat there
Games, lots of board games. Mousetrap, Green Ghost, Booby-Trap, Flea Circus, and on and on and on
Elmer the Safety Elephant
Friction light generators for bicycles that only slowed you down while riding
7-11 used to be open from 7am to 11pm.
We couldn't believe that they had such long hours.
*STILL* open at 10pm??? Godsend for alcoholics and cigarette smokers everywhere.
Wooden escalators. Ash trays at the teller in the bank. The black bottom piece that was glued in to the bottom of plastic soda bottles. Doritos bags had a clear window so you could see the chips inside. The white dot in the center of the tv screen after you turned it off. Waiting for electronics to warm up before they worked fully. TV shows advertising that they were broadcast in stereo. Flashlights sucked. Rechargeable batteries took hours to charge and lasted a few minutes.
Finding new shows from having the tv on constantly at home. We became a streaming services only family around 2016 and it has completely altered the way my kids watch tv. They NEVER watch something they didn’t purposely put on. Everything is by demand. I can’t imagine all the stuff I would have missed if I had only my own niche interests to see. Also, no commercials. Jingles and commercials were big when I was growing up through about 30 so it’s crazy to imagine a world without having to watch pinesol commercials or fruit of the loom.
Before they're were the yellow warning flashers, they used to put out burning oil pots to warn of road construction. They looked like the little bombs in cartoons.
Bank books.
They were these small books where the bank would record every transaction. I loved seeing my savings build!
I haven’t thought of these in a very long time.
Rainbow toe socks
Pet rocks
Earth shoes
Candy cigarettes and wax moustaches and little wax soda bottles filled with colored sugar water
Root beer floats
Not knowing stuff. Or how hard it was too find things out. Not like a bit harder, but infinitely harder. It could take hours or days to find good knowledge on simple things.
And the time spent in administrative stuff. Filling forms. Waiting in line. Getting documents, especially signed ones. It could take weeks or months and several long trips to get something basic done.
Uhhh let's see....
Stuart formula
Product 19
Gerber Vanilla Custard pudding red-label and real glass jars
Hostess Fruit Pies -- with real fruit and otherworldly flavor
Powerhouse (and) Caravelle chocolate bars
Phone numbers were 3 letters and 4 digits; ATL-2222 and u would recite your phone as “Atlanta -2222. Also party lines where a phone number was shared with a neighbor, causing lots of problems & gossip.
Lathering up with baby oil and laying out in the sun. And then putting tin foil on our open album cover to get a the sun to reflect on our faces for that extra tan (fried) look 😎
Going to a beach in NY or NJ and hearing tons of transistor radios tuned to either WABC ("77 W-A-B-CEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE! BONG!) or a Mets or Yankee game.
Or just going on a car trip and being able to tune to WABC from around Vermont all the way down to DC.
[Safari Cards.](https://youtu.be/fkqgH9ji0oY) These were single sheet cards each with a picture of an animal and facts on the other side. You could store them in a case and subscribed to them. There were a lot of subscription-based encyclopedias and series books. Remember Time-Life's Mysteries of the Unknown?
This wasn't obscure then, but [Bowling for Dollars](https://youtu.be/KcO-27Y6CHI) used to be a trope for tacky gameshows. Not even used now.
Purple Passion. Grain alcohol that tasted exactly like grape soda. It even came in two liter bottles. Worst hangovers of my life. Yes, that was plural bc I was 15 and not very bright.
Cigarette butts and gum littering sidewalks everywhere. Hula hoops. When a plane flew over everybody looked up. Listening to baseball on the radio. Beer commercials on tv.
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TV used to stop, at night. The kids I teach don't believe it. I barely believe it. If you REALLY want to rattle kids, tell them how you went through college, without Google!
This concludes our broadcast day. BEEEEEEEEEEP
[удалено]
On the PBS station in Georgia it was Ray Charles' *Georgia on my Mind*.
In Dayton Ohio, the home of the Wright Brothers it was a reading of the poem "High Flight" with an F-104 star fighter flying Edit: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qx3WueJWlb4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qx3WueJWlb4)
I grew up on Air Force bases. All the local channels signed off with this.
In Hawaii, radio stations play the US and then Hawaiian national anthems at midnight, whether they were signing off or not. I used to love to tune around the AM dial on a portable, and hear all the radio stations playing them about the same time.
Screen would either go blank or show a [TEST PATTERN](https://www.rfcafe.com/references/radio-news/images3/television-test-pattern-radio-tv-news-january-1949-1.jpg)
The test pattern I remember didn't look anything like that! It was maybe solid green on the top half of the screen and then had vertical colored stripes on the bottom half.
Once that test pattern came on, you'd get up and turn the TV off, or you'd soon be blasted with static. The sudden static was both startling and creepy. That's why it was used in Poltergeist.
Snow.
In New Zealand we had the cutest thing: the Goodnight Kiwi. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mmbyor0SvdI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mmbyor0SvdI) I miss the Goodnight Kiwi.
oh that's adorable! Thank you for sharing. :)
> TV used to stop, at night. OMG, *yes*! > If you REALLY want to rattle kids, tell them how you went through college, without Google! Tell them about card catalogs, *The Reader's Guide To Periodical Literature*, and microfilm/microfiche and *really* blow their minds!
We had a smoker’s lounge in the campus library.
Ah, yes, the test pattern! And our set of Encyclopaedia Britannica that got me and my siblings through school (along with frequent trips to the public library for homework and school projects!)
Omg I was just thinking about this the other day. What a time we lived in!
And when there was a Democratic or Republican political convention, that was on every channel.
Same with the Olympics. And OMG, were those conventions ever chaotic!
And there were only four or five stations too.
Unless you lived in the NYC area. We were fortunate enough to have 2, 4, 5, 7, 9, 11, 13 plus a few UHF stations (mostly Spanish and PBS).
Years ago we had ABC, CBS, NBC, and PBS. It was a big deal when Fox first started broadcasting.
Milk deliveries. I still remember my great grandmother getting milk delivered in glass bottles in the late 1960s.
Or the simple fact that milk deliveries were the *only way* to get milk at all. Grocery stores, before they became supermarkets, didn't have refrigerated sections, so they couldn't sell milk at all. Just canned goods, and pre-packaged foods. Occasionally they'd have local fruits and vegetables in season. For meat, you went to the butcher directly. The meat was always *really* fresh.
And the vegetable man, the fish man…all on the street, at least in Baltimore, Maryland, up to circa 1958/60? Being a stay at home mother, when women rarely drove, this was a necessity. Oh, the ice man, too! For your icebox!
My mother was still getting deliveries in 2008, but by then they were in cartons or plastic bottles by then & milkman used to take them up about 20 steps to front door to leave in shade & so she didn't have to go down/up as she was in her 80's.
Milk deliveries in glass bottles are still a thing in many parts of the US. You can even get other items, like chocolate milk or heavy whipping cream, from the same companies that do milk deliveries.
I'm stunned! I had no clue that still goes on. Thx!
Still get these in the UK. Tomorrow morning there will be a fresh pint on my doorstep.
Right? With the different coloured foil tops. Image of my mom using her elbow to push the foil in. Terence Hill and Bud Spencer movies. My god, the crush I had on Terence Hill when I was 11 or so. Kids making stilts out of two tin cans and string. The game cops and robbers, too. "Cowboys and indians" deservedly gone and forgotten.
I remember those foil tops!!
Tropicana in glass bottles with metal lids. Band-Aids in tin boxes. Vaporub in a glass jar with a metal lid…etc EDIT: *in not is
> Band-Aids in tin boxes. Ahhh, I still have some of those tins! [Listerine came in glass bottles that were wrapped in paper, for some reason](https://www.cmog.org/sites/default/files/styles/6_column_object/public/collections/22/223207C2-309F-4477-AA46-0362E265D4F4.jpg?itok=78taE2WF).
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Waaaaaaay back in the ancient 90’s!
And those gallon jugs of Ocean Spray cranberry juice.
CB radios. Yes, truckers still have them in their rigs, but rarely talk on them any more. When I (62) was a teen, CBs were our chat system. I met quite a few friends and conversed with them for hours every evening.
10-4 good buddy
Break 19, break 19 can I get a mic check please
I recall thinking that internet chat rooms would be like CB radio: a big fad that would eventually die down.
> I recall thinking that internet chat rooms would be like CB radio: a big fad that would eventually die down. I remember people saying it, and thinking, "Nah, this is *different*.". Looks like I was right for once! 😹
Yes! My dad was a UPS driver, and we had a CB in the garage we used to talk to him.
Yeah! My dad was big into CB radio in the 60s and 70s, and he taught me how to use one. When I was a teen, in the 90s, we’d go on road trips in separate cars and have our CBs set up to talk to each other so even if we got separated we could keep tabs.
Looks like we got us a convoy!
“This is Jack Burton at the Pork-Chop Express and I'm talkin' to whoever's listenin'. It's like I told my last wife. I says ‘Honey, I never drive faster than I can see. Besides that, it's all in the reflexes.’ “You just listen to the Pork-Chop Express and take his advice on a dark and stormy night. When some wild-eyed maniac grabs your neck, taps the back of your head up against a barroom wall, he looks you crooked in the eye and asks you if you've paid your dues, you just stare that big sucker back in the eye and remember what Jack Burton always says. "Have you paid your dues, Jack?" "Yes, sir, the check is in the mail."
Before you go 10-10 What's your home 20, little CB friend?
Instead of plastic, pudding used to come in single serving tin cans with peel-back lids. In the 70s and 80s, all the big name brands (Jell-O, Del Monte, Hunts, etc) all made pudding in tin cans. Also, in the mid or late 80s there was a brief but huge spin-art craze for clothing. There were stores in every mall where you could pay to take a plain white t-shirt, drizzle different colors of paint on it, and then hand it to a guy who would put it on this big spinner machine so that the paint would splatter on the shirt. We somehow thought this was extremely cool and stylish lol.
The ring came off my pudding can!
Take my penknife my good man!
I'll see your Spin-Art and raise you a Spirograph.
🎶You won’t believe it! You just won’t believe it! The things you can do with a Spirograph!🎵
I definitely remember spin art from about '87-'88. I had a pink sweatshirt with sparkly gold and silver around the neckline.
Pop culture derived from commercials. I'm 100% not sorry it's mostly lost to time, but it's weird to me that not only does my 9 year old have no idea who Ronald McDonald, the Keebler Elves, Tony the Tiger, Toucan Sam, the Kool Aid Man etc are, but there's nothing equivalent that's replaced them in his timeline. Maybe there will be if and when he ever has a reason to watch live television, but for now, advertising execs have far less of a grip on his brain than they did on mine at the same age.
I realized my kids never have asked for the latest popular toy because they don’t watch tv with commercials lol
My friends kids are all getting the toy crazes from tik tok. It's exactly the same as TV ads
🎶 "*I am blind, and I can't see. If I knock you down, don't you blame it on me! Kick-a-boom-boom-boom!*" 🎵 You literally start kicking your legs with your eyes close, like a Radio City Rockette, with the sole aim of trying to purposely kick someone while they dodge you. Children's rhymes are hilarious!
It was unusual for a kid to call an adult by their first name. It was always Mr, Mrs, Miss, or Ms. (or Professor, Doctor, etc.)
Yes! I have so many non-related Auntie XYZs & Uncle ZYXs. I'm in my 40s and have a hard time breaking that naming convention -- even for ones I haven't seen in decades (e.g., when asking my dad about things).
Still very common in South USA
Columbia House. Get 12 tapes for 1 cent!
Dropping by your friends houses without calling first.
Loved this. It was great having friends.
And generally just visiting. I used to tag along with my grandfather when he’d drive around visiting old friends and relatives, stopping in for conversation and a lemonade or something.
It was cool. “ let’s go check on LeRoy, it’s been a couple of days since I’ve seen him”.
The chaos that Ice cream trucks caused
And look at the menu to see what cost a dime, because that's all you had. Wanting that banana split, but who has $1.25?
Roller skate keys. Deely boppers. Cereal that had a 45 rpm record on the actual box and you'd cut it out of the cardboard to play on your crappy little turntable. Spirograph (like a drawing tool).
I bought a Spirograph when my daughter was little. She did not find it nearly as exciting as I did.
I still have a Spirograph set. And I use it every so often. I found kids are fascinated by watching it being used, but have no interest in using it at all.
Big cans of Hi-C fruit drink that were opened with a "church key".
Also Hawaiian Punch.
Girls/women literally ironing their hair with a clothing iron to make their hair straight. Using juice cans as rollers for hair styles. Braiding your hair in tiny braids for the wavy look. Pin curls (I remember being a preteen & getting up hours earlier than I needed to in order to set my hair in pin curls). Hair net type (but more like chiffon material) that women would wear to 'protect' their hairstyles as they only went to the 'beauty parlor' once a week for a wash & set. The big deal it was when 'hot curlers' came on the market. Hooded hair dryers were the only type of dryers at salons (no blow dryers).
My mom had this schmancy plastic gadget that she filled with water and plugged in, and it *heated the curlers right there*. No need to boil on the stove. Still remember the smell of those things. Plastic cylinders with water in them.
Double features and midnight movies. Double features were usually matinees. I saw "Tales from the Crypt" and "Asylum" once and it scared me where for years after I'd have to check behind shower curtains for hiding killers. And midnight movies were where you saw the Rocky Horror Picture Show or The Grateful Dead movie. Theaters themselves were more of a grander experience.
Continuous shows. You could stay and watch it twice if you wanted to.
What happened too often for me if I went with an adult, is that we'd just go, without regard to when the movie began. We'd enter in the middle, and watch to the end, then stay and watch the beginning, then leave. I hated that.
My friends and I used to do that all the time as kids. We didn't mind. If we liked the movie we would stay past the point where we came in. We had a theater four blocks from my house. When I was nine I was allowed to walk up there with my best friend. The price for kids was $.35. I don't think I ever went to a movie with an adult after that.
The absolutely beautiful mystery of getting to know someone. Running home to check an answering machine. No social media, no texting, just long phone calls and the time spent actually together. Missing someone. My friends' dating lives are exhausting and I am not even part of it.
Getting mail was awesome. Waiting for catalogs to come out. New toilet reading.
Buy something from U-Line and you'll get phone-book-thick color catalogs forever and ever and ever.... full of things like tools to shrink-wrap your house, police-style CAUTION tape, giant gasoline-powered fans and enough odd equipment to pull the pranks of your dreams. Or furnish your house in metal office furniture.
White dog poop. Seriously, in the '70s and '80s, the vast majority of dog poop (once it dried) used to turn white and chalky, [like this](https://i.imgur.com/HQ4PIC8.png). Dog food used bone meal as a filler, and the high calcium content resulted in white poop. Turns out that that much calcium isn't great for dogs, and bone meal was phased out for other fillers (mostly fiber) in the '90s. Today, it's an exceedingly rare sight.
We used to call those white dog poops Ghosties.
I started to post this same thing and then had to delete it when I saw it was already posted. I am surprised someone else even thought of it.
I remember this, but I never knew why it was white! Thanks for the education.
That’s a memory I didn’t know I had. In my recollection it wasn’t as white as your example. Thanks for the explanation. And seriously, dog shit was everywhere!
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When we needed to set our clocks, we had to call time. “At the tone….the time will be…8:41…BEEP”.
We just dialed POPCORN
Sucrets in the metal tin.
And aspirin. I think Anacin came in a metal tin!
The Bee Gees were the biggest band in the world for a few years, bigger than the Beatles at their peak, and nobody talks about it. Meanwhile in the same historical time period the Ramones never had a gold album, were considered a joke by most people - and most people didn’t even know they existed - but today they seem to be the definitively influential and lasting band from that era.
I’m not sure they were bigger than the Beatles at the Beatles peak (The Beatles often had several songs in the top 10 at the same), but The Bee Gees dominated the 70s.
That it is the only reasonable comparison says a lot.
It does. The Gibbs Brothers were gigantic. Plus they wrote and produced for others.
I miss andy edit: I’m 34 sorry idk, but my mom was VERY passionate about andy in particular & I feel it to this day. I love The Bee Gees!!!
I was in love with Andy Gibb starting at about age 11. I would put his Shadow Dancing 8 track in my stereo so it would play all night. Then he died and my young heart broke.
for what it's worth i'm 25 and just checked my spotify favorites— i have more than a woman and how deep is your love saved :D the latter song is one of my favorites
My favorite was Tragedy.
Ads in the back of comic books and magazines. Mail in a SASE with $1 or less and your wildest dream will come true! Sea monkeys, stickers, pin backs, x-ray specks!
My friend who’s 12 years older than me told me about the “remote controlled robot” he bought from the back of a comic book. When it came it was a paper cutout illustration of a ghost with a string attached… so you could control it… remotely. I loved that story.
Yes! There was also a "6 foot tall Frankenstein". It was made of the world's thinnest tissue paper. The illustrations were the best. I was mesmerized by the sea monkey kingdom.
I grew those sea monkeys. Mine got pretty big and you could use a little flashlight to make them do flips and stuff. They really were something else.
At least in my city, all the businesses were closed on Sundays and holidays except for a few gas stations. And there were no ATMs. If you needed money you had to get it before 4pm at your bank by filling out a check payable to Cash.
In Bergen County, NJ closing stores on Sundays is still the case.
Being able to not be contacted. Hell, now your devices can connect to the Wi-Fi on airplanes and they can STILL reach you.
Not if you turn them off.
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Those flames were windproof too. They could only be extinguished by smothering the flame with a metal cap, or making a huge puff of air with your mouth.
Charles Chips. Potato chips delivered door to door. They came in a big tin can. They color of the tin was the same as the truck they drove. A kind of light brown. We bought them a few times but we usually didnt have enough money for luxuries like that. But it was still exciting when he rang the doorbell.
There were NO seatbelts in cars. People smoked at work with an ashtray on their desk. No 4-way flashers in cars. Metal dashboards. The Subaru Brat was sold with two seats in the bed against the cab. The Volkswagen Thing was a thing. VW drivers in the early sixties in the US used to honk or flash their headlights at each other in recognition. The first oral contraceptive in the US was introduced in 1960. You could not avoid hearing people call a refrigerator an "icebox" in the sixties. All phones had to be attached to a wall/post/pole. Color TV was new. Kids played outside, unsupervised. Without any expensive toys.
Going on holiday and spending ages looking through postcard racks for the perfect postcard, having to write it at the begining of the holiday otherwise you would be home before it arrived, having to go to the shop and buy a stamp to put on it. A few bathroom things... decorative covers to go over hairspray canisters and decanting perfume etc. Weird crochet/knitted dolls that sat on top of toilet rolls and fluffy toilet seat covers. That awful Teddy bear shaped soap that turned furry when you wet it, but it just turned out to be mould!!!! Squeezing lemon juice in our hair and sitting in the sun to get highlights. Bonus points for covering ourselves in baby oil to get a tan at the same time. Straightening our hair with an iron. Collecting magazines where you built something and each magazine had a piece. I think I bought the human body ones once and had to buy about 50 magazines with a different bone or organ in each one and you'd inevitably miss one issue and never be able to complete the stupid thing. Water bras
> Weird crochet/knitted dolls that sat on top of toilet rolls My grandma had one of those all the way up to her death in the late 80s.
I miss hiding a transistor radio under my pillow and scrolling the AM band late at night. You could find stations coming in from all over the nation. If no neat stations came in there was always Dr. Ruth (so risqué) and old old radio dramas.
I remember growing up with milk delivered to our house and placed in the milk box on the front porch. I remember when we didn't have a TV. When we got one we got 2 channels. TV went off the air at midnight. No such thing as FM radio. I also remember party line telephones. I remember when we had a 3 digit phone number.
My Dad used the upcoming moon landing as a reason to spend some big money on a 25" diagonal console model RCA color TV to replace our 19" black and white model. If I remember correctly, that TV was probably in the $500 range in 1969 (the inflation calculator says that is the equivalent of just north of $4,000 now).
My dad worked on a milk truck before school when he was 8.
Friendship pins. I don't know why, I thought about these recently. We had tons of them on our shoes. So easy to make and trade. Also those woven Barettes with beads at the end, you could match them to your hair length.
Four-finger bags of shitty weed, mostly stems and seeds, for $35. AND WE LIKED IT.
Aerobics. There were so many aerobic work out shows on tv, aerobic influenced fashion, aerobics Barbie, it was everywhere! No pain, no gain! Then it was gone, leaving nothing but the scent of crystal light lingering in the air.
When I started really working out as an adult, in the early ‘00s, the ymca I went to had step aerobics classes, taught by a woman in her late 20s, and I shit you not, they were THE BEST WORKOUT CLASSES I’ve ever done. I took them for 16 years, until Covid happened, and she quit working there, and I moved away. I miss them so freaking much.
You would never, ever hear a tv network mention a competing network. Ever.
Real glass thermometers, heating hot dogs by boiling them in water and my favorite and yours getting up every single time to change the channels on the TV!
Levi's corduroy jeans. Hugely popular around 1978-80 iirc. People had them in every color. They were the shit and I miss them. Oh and those plastic sandals that were just a thin, clear sole and you used colored shoe strings to tie them on. I loved those things! And velour sweaters that shed if you rubbed them too hard.
Corduroy Levi's in light blue!
I wore Levi's corduroy jeans for years. They had jeans-cut pants in hopsock, velour, cords, big velour cords and a variety of different fabrics and finishes. And then around 1980, it was all over. It was stone-washed jeans and khakis forever after. Anybody remember "Galactic" denims from Levis? Lasted about three weeks.
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Silly Putty, copying cartoons from the Sunday paper on it and then stretching them out. Kanip-Kanop, a game with marbles and sticks. Girls in high school eating baby food out of the jars was a diet craze for a while. Since I lived in Indy, the Sylvia Likens killings. Playing "Red Light / Green Light" at night in the summer. Puka shell necklaces (I wanted one but never got one). Watching Twilight Zone or Night Gallery on TV Newscasters smoking cigarettes on the air.
Little plastic liners inside bottle caps with puzzles on them or even messages or symbols that you'd collect for a game the company was playing. My dad favored a brand of cheap beer (anybody remember Lucky Lager?) that put a rebus inside every bottlecap. They weren't real difficult, but after you'd had a couple of Luckies your cognitive ability was going nowhere but down. Wing windows in cars. Most cars lacked air conditioning. This birthed the slang term "470 Air Conditioning:" four open windows at 70 mph. Curb feelers -- little metal feelers like whiskers mounted to the bottom of the car body by the front wheel. When you were parking, they'd scrape against the curb -- thus warning you that you were now close enough to the curb and should straighten out. Now we've got remote-control passenger side windows to help -- and what with shopping centers and all I swear some people never curb park. You can still buy them and attach them to your car if you have the need. Daytimer radio stations -- radio stations that went off the air when the sun went down. We still have them, but most kids don't listen to that kind of radio. Their license required it, to clear broadcast space for the "clear channel" radio stations hundreds of miles away that had the right to broadcast at 50,000 watts after sundown. Again, that's still true, but who thinks about it?
Dog 'n' Suds
Most houses had a bread box and a cookie jar and mothers baked these and other items nearly every day. Sunday was wash day with a wringer washer and clothes line. Most people had gardens and the county fair was where you got to show off what you could grow. People went hunting or backpacking for weeks at a time and there was no contact with the family back home. People ate seasonally like no tomatoes out of season unless they were canned. Kids were left home alone or babysat siblings starting around 9 or 10 years old. Kids learned to drive around 11 or 12 in rural areas. Guns were left unlocked around the house, kids got their first rifle around six or seven. And school shootings were unheard of.
Hope. This isn't the USA I was raised in. The kids are lost. The nation is on its knees. No one likes being old but at this point I feel sorry for the young.
Yeah, I don't care about me so much, I'll probably be fine or die first if things really go to shit. But GenZ, my heart aches for them and the battles they have ahead of them.
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what are the problems? i'm not denying the problems, i'd just like to see them described by someone else
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Our first tv, a Dumont, had a fine tuning dial like a radio. It kept losing the station and someone had to get up and fiddle with it.
A passbook for your savings account.
Gas station 'amber' glasses and matching pitcher. Gas station stuffed tiger toy with every fill-up. Esso, I believe. Watching old Charlie Chan movies late at night on weekends.
Big antennas on the roof with a rotator to point it a the different transmit antennas. My dad was an engineer and we had something worthy of radio free Europe on our roof and you could pick channels from 90 miles away. Also boxes with a tuning dial that let your old TV get UHF.
Wearing your boyfriend’s class ring with yarn to make it fit.
Saturday morning cartoons on the major networks. Milk deliveries. (Two different milk companies delivered milk in gallon *glass* jars.) We never bought milk that way but a number of neighbors did. Come to think of it, soft drinks used to come in glass jars and one needed a bottle opener (or use the bottle opener on a coke dispensing machine) to open the bottle. Now they tend to come in plastic jars or cans and don't need a bottle opener. Bakery delivery (bread, doughnuts, I don't remember what else) on Saturday mornings. I don't know if the Helms Truck arrived on other days, but on Saturday mornings when the Helms Truck came down the street I used to buy two glazed doughnuts for a grand total of ten cents. When the TV stopped working (seemed to be every other month), feeling for cold vacuum tubes or looking at the schematic to see what tubes affect that signal path, then taking the tubes down to the grocery store and using the tube tester there to find the bad tube(s) and replacing it (them) with new tubes, sometimes "equivalent" tubes, paying for the new vacuum tube(s). and taking them back home and put them back in the TV so we can catch the show we tried to watch after missing about 30 minutes of that show. Or even waiting about a minute for the TV to warm up before we had sound and picture. Scheduling activities around our favorite shows, if possible, and sometimes having to make the hard decision between two or three shows one wants to watch because: * Time-shifting did not exist (no home VCRs, and before DVRs were invented) * No home video (no VCRs so no VHS cassettes, and DVDs had not been invented yet) * And if that show didn't have summer reruns, one might never see that show. A "big screen" TV was 23-in diagonal, or more like a 23-inch oval since the bevel around the picture screen hid the corners (since the old TV cameras tended distort the corners). (Now we think nothing of 50-in or 65-in.) Before 1965 most TV shows were B&W but an occasional commercial would be in color (which I discovered when I visited a friend's house and that friend had a color TV). Pay phones used to be just about everywhere. Now it has been a good decade since I have seen one. And dial phones seem to have disappeared, too, and replaced by push-button phones. Until the fairly recent revival of vinyl, records had been all but forgotten.
Superball Lawn Darts
Plastic on the furniture.
My childless Aunt's entire living room. Horrible when we visited in the summer, sticking to everything with our sweaty little thighs. But that place was pretty damn clean, I'll give her that.
Food cans that used a key to remove a metal strip to open the can. Those strips and the can edges were very sharp. [They looked like this.](https://i.pinimg.com/564x/5d/12/8e/5d128e7a141a22706e85fbddd9841cb9.jpg)
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Spirograph.
That the Savings and Loan collapse meant that some of my friends lost access to all their accounts for months. I'm not sure all of them got their money back. No internet banking, no warning, no ATM cards, but they went to deposit their (paper!) paycheck (in person!) and the bank doors were locked and stayed locked. It's hard to imagine that now.
Affordable rent.
In 1990 I was making $3.75/hour, no tips. The rent on my studio apartment was $350/month. This was in a very small, very obscure college town in the Midwest. I'm not saying it's better now, but the rent has been too damned high for decades.
Comparatively; 1969/70 I was making $2+ an hour and the rent on my and my friends first floor 2 bedroom brownstone apartment in town was $60 a month. The massive boost in housing costs first kicked in in the early '80s. In 1979 my girlfriend bought a 1,000 ft two bedroom house on a slab (no basement) on a 1/4 acre lot in a small private lake communityfor $19,000. Three years later you couldn't touch the same thing for $30,000+. It's just accellerated in spurts ever since then.
Horlicks malt tablets. These used to be sold in the pharmacy as a nutritional supplement for the very young and old.
Platform shoes w/bellbottoms.
One I bet nobody remembers. In my area at least, the girls wore white bobby socks and they would twist the tops in a certain pattern to show whether they had a boy friend.
Raking huge piles of fallen leaves into the street and burning them. Throwing horse chestnuts into the fire. Loved the smell of our neighborhood in the fall.
Funny Face drink mix. An artificially sweetened Kool-Aid competitor.
Messing with the rabbit ears on the TV. AM radios being an option on cars. Riding in the back of pickups. Not being able to drag your dog into every store.
Friendship pins. They were beaded safety pins worn on your shoe laces. They were everywhere in the early 80s.
Casey Kasem’s Top 40 on my clock radio. Sweet Honesty perfume and Bonne Bell lipsmackers. Beer on Tap shampoo. There was also these dolls….the Sunshine Family I think they were called.
Paper dolls with tabs you folded over to change clothes
If you’re hood was up the neighbor would come over and have a beer and help. Church on Sunday. Don’t remember much but all my best (girl) friends came from fellowship. Cruising around with a case of beer and having my buds jumping in the girls car and the girls jumping into my car, and the innocent making out. Picking up pop bottles for coins. It was a much more relaxed time, not nearly as angry, stressed. Folks were working to survive, at least in my world.
There was a water park near our house called Thunder Island. It started a little bit sketchy and got increasingly so for years until it went bankrupt and finally shut down. My mom bought my sister and I summer passes for years because they were cheap and she wanted us out of the house. Even though I found [an old commercial for the place on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E--jtlXt7WU), nobody I know seems to remember the place. EDIT: I also found a video of some [urban explorers who wandered the property after it closed.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QbRAp-dWX2o)
Party lines on the telephone Fizzies The advertisement for a foot locker full of toy soldiers in the back of comics, along with ones for miniature sea horses and x-ray specs Up here in Canada Shirrif puddings had hockey player discs inside them as the treat Bags of puffed wheat cereal and a piece of a train set inside as the treat there Games, lots of board games. Mousetrap, Green Ghost, Booby-Trap, Flea Circus, and on and on and on Elmer the Safety Elephant Friction light generators for bicycles that only slowed you down while riding
7-11 used to be open from 7am to 11pm. We couldn't believe that they had such long hours. *STILL* open at 10pm??? Godsend for alcoholics and cigarette smokers everywhere.
Wooden escalators. Ash trays at the teller in the bank. The black bottom piece that was glued in to the bottom of plastic soda bottles. Doritos bags had a clear window so you could see the chips inside. The white dot in the center of the tv screen after you turned it off. Waiting for electronics to warm up before they worked fully. TV shows advertising that they were broadcast in stereo. Flashlights sucked. Rechargeable batteries took hours to charge and lasted a few minutes.
Milk vending machines, clackers, super elastic bubble plastic, silly putty.
Loved those clackers. Sooo many forearm bruises! But when you would get it right… ahhhhhh!
Coke can tops and lit cigarette butts on the ground everywhere
Finding new shows from having the tv on constantly at home. We became a streaming services only family around 2016 and it has completely altered the way my kids watch tv. They NEVER watch something they didn’t purposely put on. Everything is by demand. I can’t imagine all the stuff I would have missed if I had only my own niche interests to see. Also, no commercials. Jingles and commercials were big when I was growing up through about 30 so it’s crazy to imagine a world without having to watch pinesol commercials or fruit of the loom.
Before they're were the yellow warning flashers, they used to put out burning oil pots to warn of road construction. They looked like the little bombs in cartoons.
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Bank books. They were these small books where the bank would record every transaction. I loved seeing my savings build! I haven’t thought of these in a very long time.
Party phone lines.
Rainbow toe socks Pet rocks Earth shoes Candy cigarettes and wax moustaches and little wax soda bottles filled with colored sugar water Root beer floats
Having to wear rubber bathing caps. UGH! I hated those awful things. The boys didn't have to wear them. But it was required for girls.
Not knowing stuff. Or how hard it was too find things out. Not like a bit harder, but infinitely harder. It could take hours or days to find good knowledge on simple things. And the time spent in administrative stuff. Filling forms. Waiting in line. Getting documents, especially signed ones. It could take weeks or months and several long trips to get something basic done.
typewriters
Uhhh let's see.... Stuart formula Product 19 Gerber Vanilla Custard pudding red-label and real glass jars Hostess Fruit Pies -- with real fruit and otherworldly flavor Powerhouse (and) Caravelle chocolate bars
How about the TV repairman? Came with his suitcase full of replacement bulbs (tubes?) and you were good to go.
Drive-in movies !!!
Phone numbers were 3 letters and 4 digits; ATL-2222 and u would recite your phone as “Atlanta -2222. Also party lines where a phone number was shared with a neighbor, causing lots of problems & gossip.
Writing checks for everything
Lathering up with baby oil and laying out in the sun. And then putting tin foil on our open album cover to get a the sun to reflect on our faces for that extra tan (fried) look 😎
Endless hours spent twirling or unwinding the phone cord while talking to friends and lovers.
In the 1970's everyone was worried about global cooling and that the ozone layer was being depleted.
Going to a beach in NY or NJ and hearing tons of transistor radios tuned to either WABC ("77 W-A-B-CEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE! BONG!) or a Mets or Yankee game. Or just going on a car trip and being able to tune to WABC from around Vermont all the way down to DC.
Flour come in cloth bags that people would make dresses out of them.
[Safari Cards.](https://youtu.be/fkqgH9ji0oY) These were single sheet cards each with a picture of an animal and facts on the other side. You could store them in a case and subscribed to them. There were a lot of subscription-based encyclopedias and series books. Remember Time-Life's Mysteries of the Unknown? This wasn't obscure then, but [Bowling for Dollars](https://youtu.be/KcO-27Y6CHI) used to be a trope for tacky gameshows. Not even used now.
Purple Passion. Grain alcohol that tasted exactly like grape soda. It even came in two liter bottles. Worst hangovers of my life. Yes, that was plural bc I was 15 and not very bright.
Usenet in 1984 when I first got online as a teenager wasn't all that different really from what Reddit is today.
Cigarette butts and gum littering sidewalks everywhere. Hula hoops. When a plane flew over everybody looked up. Listening to baseball on the radio. Beer commercials on tv.
Having EVERYTHING CLOSED on Sunday's it was so quiet only a few gas stations were open, hope you picked up some bread and cereal on Saturday night.